My new hiver buddy wanted me to defend an unknown planet on the other side of the universe and I was thinking "it would be cool if" hiver allies could let each other use their gates in times of need. Luckily a few years later when a silicoid attacked my little colony she had a gate at my world and sent 51 DEs to defend me. That's what friends are for!

Anyway I always assumed the reason hivers can't pop out of each others' gates is because they have subspace(?) encryption or something. I'm imagining a rogue princess swapping the keys and stranding the Empress' flagship in the wrong place at the wrong time for a coup... Awesome.....

I also wondered why humans can't use Zuul node lines... Maybe they can see them but the chief Spock is like, "Kirk you know using Zuul lines is an OSHA violation, don't get us chewed out again when we lose track of our tanker escort in the wrong part of subspace!"

Incidentally does anyone know why some Liir would leave 14 DEs at my colony for 30 years? We have a ceasefire and have been doing peaceful resolution the whole time, and they keep sending fleets of 1 to reinforce every year or two. Maybe they ran out of fuel? Maybe they went native and it's a star seed kind of thing?

It was my understanding that different hiver factions build their gate networks using different "frequencies" that are hardwired into the engineering -- use a different frequency would be a pretty fundamental change and not something done at the flick of a switch.

Humans can't use Zuul node lines for a couple reasons, firstly they can't see them directly because their scanners are tuned to look for natural node fractures that occur in certain locations according to one set of physics principles, but artificial rips into nodespace are sufficiently different that the node points can't be seen directly but only inferred from the presence of Zuul ships. The converse is also true. The technologies are just a bit too dissimilar; otherwise, humans and Zuul would be able to see one another's node lines on the map.

Other factions that have sent a fleet to your colony (e.g. because you were in a colonization race and they lost) won't move on because the AI is not smart like a human player. It just seems to think "well I guess if it's at an enemy colony I should treat it as an attack fleet" during the strategic turn, even if you keep suing for peace during the tactical phase. But it is true that the AI does send refineries to rescue fleets that it thinks are stuck somewhere so that's probably the single ship reinforcements.